Australian 250K Raster maps now online free

Dooghan · Post by **Dooghan** » 12 November 05 6:05 pm

Raster maps now online - from https://www.ga.gov.au/news/index.jsp#raster
"Geoscience AustraliaÃ‚â€™s 1:250,000 scale national topographic data,TOPO-250K RASTER, is now available free online. It forms the backbone of NATMAP Raster products which are popular in the recreational and commercial markets.

This much anticipated release will be of significant benefit to GIS users across a wide range of applications, such as regional planning, agriculture, emergency management, environment, tourism and map based presentations. Commercial map makers will also benefit, with the data (an alternative to vector data) allowing for the development of commercial map products for tourism and other markets.

TOPO-250K RASTER is made available free online as part of the Australian Government's Spatial Data Access and Pricing Policy.

The TOPO-250K RASTER data is a raster version of Geoscience Australia's GEODATA TOPO-250K Series 2 national fundamental vector data.

The TOPO-250K RASTER data can be downloaded free as individual mapsheets by visiting our Free Downloads page and searching on topography. Users are required to complete a simple registration process and use the data in accordance with the licence provisions"

Dooghan

ideology · Post by **ideology** » 12 November 05 6:14 pm

this is awesome news!
it's always been really hard to get open access to maps in australia and it's great to see the various governments coming around

now, to integrate them into caching!

The Garner Family · Post by **The Garner Family** » 12 November 05 7:35 pm

Fantastic... I've already downloaded a few!

Chwiliwr · Post by **Chwiliwr** » 12 November 05 8:40 pm

To have the individual tiles is good for small areas but for those that want to use these maps on a laptop or PC and are dealing with larger areas I would suggest that they get hold of the whole of Australia mosaic which has joined all of them together. This is still a cost option from GA but so is getting these individual layers for each state on CD instead of downloading them directly from the site.<p>
I set up the free MapInfo viewer with the 250k mosaic dataset as a backdrop to a whole of Australia cache dataset for Belken to use for planning on his recent trip around Australia. He found it was better for planning than Mapsource as he could still see the roads at a scales where Mapsource cut them out.<p>
I kept him up to date by replacing the cache dataset with the latest information via email. You can see an example here in the GCA Gallery of what he could see.

toholio · Post by **toholio** » 13 November 05 4:14 pm

Chwiliwr wrote:To have the individual tiles is good for small areas but for those that want to use these maps on a laptop or PC and are dealing with larger areas I would suggest that they get hold of the whole of Australia mosaic which has joined all of them together.

If you are really hardcore you could download the 250K GIS data and setup your own mapserver

I've got a copy of all the layers for the 9 tiles covering Melbourne and it's surrounds on one of my computers with a "gritty" mapserver front-end.

Zytheran · Post by **Zytheran** » 13 November 05 9:03 pm

Hmm, time for a bit of ecw to jpg conversion before sucking into Google Earth and overlaying with my unfound list.
And the sweet bit is the GPS is already loaded with the 1:250k vector maps from GA so it might all mesh nicely together.

And the verdict is.. big rasters and Google don't mix.
Usual problem of putting flat paper map onto round earth..

aloysius · Post by **aloysius** » 13 November 05 10:33 pm

how hard is ecw to jpg conversion? is it possible to conver to geotiff? sorry to hijack thread but i have been trying to work this out for a while!

Chwiliwr · Post by **Chwiliwr** » 13 November 05 11:40 pm

The free ECW Viewer can save in GeoTiff format but I have never actually tried it in something that uses GeoTiff as I use MapInfo.

You can download the viewer directly from ERMapper.

aloysius · Post by **aloysius** » 14 November 05 8:27 am

thanks....I am wanting to give the QGIS program a go but it wont open all my ecw maps....

dajjct · Post by **dajjct** » 14 November 05 11:50 am

Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ con convert lots of formats including ECW to JPG.

Chwiliwr · Post by **Chwiliwr** » 14 November 05 12:35 pm

One thing to watch in converting ecw to anything else is that the resulting file can be huge or you loose a lot of the detail by trying to make it smaller.

I had an ecw mosaic image of one of our local government areas that was about 500mb in ecw format but was more than 4.5gb when converted to a jpg and it had lost a lot of detail lost. When keeping the detail at a similar level it was over 8gb. Our GIS could handle both files but was much slower than when using the original ecw image.

Our conclusion was that converting from ecw to tiff or jpg was only worth while if it was a small area of the image and was being given to someone who couldn't handle ecw.

c.j.b · Post by **c.j.b** » 14 November 05 10:03 pm

Anyone been about to make use of the proprietry data formats under Linux/FOSS?

Arcinfo/Arcview/Mapinfo/ECW are all fine-and-dandy if you're a Complict Windows User, but there doesn't appear to be any open-source tools (or even binary-only viewers that work on anything other than 10-year-old RedHat machines)

Chwiliwr · Post by **Chwiliwr** » 14 November 05 10:36 pm

Just search the net and you will find plenty in the open source area that could possibly help you on your platform.

One that I came across just yesterday was http://www.gdal.org and from one of the links on that site I found an open GIS program that appears to work on both windows and linux.

By the way I think you should leave ECW off your list as that is like adding JPG to the list. ECW is a image format not a program and there are a number of viewers available on non windows platforms. ERMapper does a great job of providing free interfaces to its format. (I'm not associated with the company but have promoted them from the time they first started as they are Perth based.)

c.j.b · Post by **c.j.b** » 15 November 05 4:32 am

One that I came across just yesterday was http://www.gdal.org and from one of the links on that site I found an open GIS program that appears to work on both windows and linux.

gdal's ECW support (and all those "free" viewers) is dependent on the binary-only ERMapper x86-Linux-only libraries being installed, which isn't an option on the NetBSD/Debian/PPC machines here, or for anyone who intends to use the software for more than a few years. gdal was one of the first projects I checked out, it being linked to from freegis.org.

ECW is a image format not a program and there are a number of viewers available on non windows platforms. ERMapper does a great job of providing free interfaces to its format.

I know; it's a patent encumbered variation of the JPEG2000 specification... so it's not exactly free, except for certain complict definitions.

Mind Socket · Post by **Mind Socket** » 15 November 05 10:53 am

I think you're right c.j.b, such a beast unfortunately does not appear to exist due to patent restrictions. Geo/GIS stuff is about the only thing keeping me with a Windows environment these days.

- Rog